my opinion about the book(ann)

Reading "the elephant and the dragon", I recognized the process of rising India and China, how these two giant countries effect global economy ,and what problems they are facing, and their tide influences with American. As an Taiwaness, I already know there are lots books describing and TV shows discussing how strong the economy in China will be. But the way Meredith describes are still fresh for me, not only the author's position but also her understandable details and convincing examples that Chinese even don't know. Meredith, as an American,shows us (and US)a different angle to visualize her readers what's dramatically changing in China and India through frequently comparing by using America life as a standard, such as skyscrapers, Starbucks ,highways, Mcdonald's ... .Thus, we can imagine what kind of future for a developing country will be good in a western people's mind. Maybe having modern life just like western but sacrificing the environment or health will be the destiny of most developing countries, although the author tried to balance by describing the serious issues such as pollutions and geopolitics in China and India, it's still questionable to me. The other unsatisfied point for me is that she used lots successful examples about middle class in the urban cities or high educated people,however, how about those anonymous labors or the life in rural places which are the major part that we still have no idea about. If she add more about these in her chapters, we can see the whole vision of entire structure not only the amazing market or GDP numbers. Just as Jushua said, we should consider not only “standards of living” or "creating numbers",but what kind life should a people or a labor deserve. Experiencing the bad result of destroying west coast in Taiwan due to the OEM period 20 years ago, people are forced to think about different kind of developing.If people start to put economy interests ahead of other important values and be over tolerant or to yield anything in the name of developing, it will trigger a tragedy in all developing countries. Anyway,it's a understandable book and worthy to read.